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! c h a p t e r 2 walking backwards Victoria Ocampo’s Scenes of Intrusion Victoria Ocampo’s first play, La laguna de los nenúfares (1926) enacts the journey to maturity of its protagonist, Copo de Nieve, portrayed initially as a “snowflake that doesn’t melt” (14). Shipwrecked, the orphan Copo de Nieve is raised in an idyllic forest by an overprotective Magician and two tutors, Optimio the dog and Atrabilis the cat. But Copo de Nieve prefers play with animals to formal lessons and, in a search for selfde finition, imitates his companions’ singularities. He walks on all fours with the hare, strives to grow a camel’s hump, and walks backwards with the crab. In a strikingly comparable anecdote, Ocampo’s autobiography describes a sheltered, privileged childhood in Buenos Aires and in the family home in Villa Ocampo, surrounded by doting parents and aunts. As did Copo de Nieve, Ocampo sought escape from governesses through play, and she recalls an adolescent inclination to mimic. She recounts impersonating the first young man to provoke her infatuation. In a perfect imitation of his style, she began walking with her head bent over, and when her mother remarked that they needed to attach her to a brace, the young Victoria imagined herself as Cleménce of the Countess of Ségur’s Comédies et Proverbes, wearing a contraption to hold up her head (Autobiografía, 1:175). The parallels between these tales illuminate key elements in Ocampo’s assumption of a public persona and the formation of her unique genre of literary and cultural commentary, the testimonio. Both stories highlight performance as a site of learning, and the second tale links the performing body to readings, an analogy that, Sylvia Molloy argues, marks Ocampo’s autobiography.1 The two stories underscore Ocampo’s fascination with theatre, as both youths enact the gestures of another. In both accounts, parents and teachers discourage the mimicry, just as Ocampo’s parents forbade the theatrical career she desired. But these warnings only generate more performances. Most important, the imitation in both cases yields a jarring image: a young boy walking like a crab and an adolescent girl posing like walking backwards !53 a hunchbacked youth. Beyond the audacity of the two performers, this disjuncture points to the interventionist quality of Ocampo’s dialogue with writers and books and her deliberate intellectual strategy to write against the grain and in the gaps. The best books, she argued, were those whose disorder obliged one to “read them backwards” (“El hombre que murió,” 7–8), an image that mirrors Copo de Nieve’s crablike gait. Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) enjoys a position in Latin American literary history unique for a woman of her time. She was a founder and director and the driving force for the journal Sur, which appeared from 1931 until 1971 and provided a rich intellectual forum throughout Latin America.2 This literary midwifery, along with Ocampo’s multiple volumes of testimonios, two plays, and six-volume autobiography, resulted in her appointment in 1977 as the first woman in Argentina’s Academia de Letras. One could argue that Ocampo’s achievements were compensatory for an unfulfilled dramatic career.3 But her experience with performance was key to her literary activism and the emergence of the testimonio. These essays, the format for which she began crafting at the same time as her first play, are marked by abrupt narrative shifts in the conversations they stage between Ocampo and particular writers, books, or ideas. The testimonios also posit an intrusive narrating persona, a convener of the conversation who interrupts and redirects it at will. This aesthetic posture and style derives from Ocampo’s early theatrical training and emergent feminism. Although some see a contradiction between Ocampo’s imposing public persona and more modest writing voice, the performative elements and motifs in her work illuminate a marked consistency between her public activity as a literary impresario and her evolving conception of her own writing .4 In the testimonios, she staged a disorderly, fruitful dialogue among the voices populating the cultural universe of her richly diverse readings. Moreover, in keeping with the high awareness of an audience derived from her theatrical training, Ocampo fancied the conversations in which she joined as public events. Because she initially wrote in French, the language of her upper-class, tutorial education, and frequently interacted with noted international figures, it is tempting to portray Ocampo as aloof from the...

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